Monday, September 17, 2012

Shame on Karen Steele and the Administration of Queensborough Community College!

A diversion from my normal blog content today. I've copied and pasted the following blog post from Clarissa at Clarissa's Blog. I am doing this at her request because of the outrageous action being threatened against an English Department at the Queensborough Community College by the QCC
Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Karen Steel, a woman who doesn't appreciate the necessity of good written English. I just hope her interim VP position is not made permanent and that she is stopped from doing untold damage to the English Department.

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Colleagues, friends, readers of this blog, and all people who care about education in this country!
I’m addressing you to ask you to stand in solidarity with the
educators at Queensborough Community College who are being bullied by a
vicious, unintelligent administrator.
Here is what is happening. Classes in English composition are
absolutely crucial for the academic success and intellectual development
of students. Here is an example of how students write when they first
arrive at a university:

During the time of the Black Death, a plague that killed
30-60% of the population all throughout the European countries, the fear
of mortal death being at its highest. Because the fear of not knowing
how the plague was transmitted and intolerance for anyone who was
different, it lead citizens to finding a scapegoat. This inflamed the
already tedious tolerance of the Jews and the Jewish religion.

This is how English speakers write in the only language they know.
The faculty members of all English departments in this country work
extremely hard to make sure that students learn to write better.
However, some administrators do not believe in the value of the
Humanities and do not appreciate the hard work required to teach
students to write well. This is what happened at one college as a result:

On Wednesday the English department at Queensborough
Community College voted not to adopt a policy of the City University of
New York to reduce composition course credits from four to three. In so
doing, they rejected the CUNY Pathways initiative, a proposal for
streamlining and centralizing CUNY curricula which many faculty regard as antithetical to students’ needs.

Just think about this, people! The administration of this school is
trying to force the faculty members to change their English program and
reduce the number of hours English composition is taught because some
brainless bureaucrat believes that English is not important. When the
scholars refused to participate in the attempts to dismantle their
program, the administration retaliated:

In an email sent to the department chair yesterday QCC
Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Karen Steele announced that
because the English department insists on granting four credits for
composition courses, those courses will no longer be offered by the
college and QCC students will be sent to other CUNY campuses to fulfill
their composition requirements. Since composition represents such a
significant portion of the department’s offerings, moreover,

All searches to fill full-time positions in the department will be cancelled.

All English department adjuncts at Queensborough will be fired.

And the appointments of all current full-time faculty in the
department will be “subject to ability to pay and Fall ’13 enrollment in
department courses.

Ms. Karen Steele is shamelessly threatening to destroy the entire
English department in her attempt to wage a war on the academics’ right
to self-governance. This is unheard of.

175 of the English department’s 206 sections this
semester are in composition, which means that the administration is
planning to eliminate nearly 85% of the of the department’s current
offerings. Given that English has a total of 26 full-time faculty listed
on its departmental page, and given that the full-time CUNY community
college courseload for three-credit courses is 4/5, the elimination of
composition would mean the firing of nearly three-quarters of the
department’s full-time faculty even after the termination of all
part-timers.

This means that even tenured faculty are at risk of being fired for
daring to have an opinion on how to run their own program. This is
unconscionable!
Please consult the extortionate email sent by this irresponsible and
anti-intellectual administrator at Queensborough Community College to
the Chair of the English Department here.
And here is the most recent update on the situation so far.
We need to step in and tell Ms. Steele – and all other administrators
who want to destroy learning and knowledge – that we will not stand for
this.

My friends, we cannot just sit there passively and let this happen.
Once a precedent is set, any administrator will be able to bully
scholars into doing anything by threatening them with collective
dismissal and the destruction of entire departments in case they dare to
have an opinion on anything. Ms. Steele is forgetting her place and is
getting dangerously close to turning herself in to a small-scale
dictator at Queensborough Community College.

Here is what I propose we do:
1. Ms. Steele’s email address is: KSteele@qcc.cuny.edu. We need to
inundate her with emails, telling her of our outrage. It is important
that these emails come from many different places in the world and from
people in different walks of life. Here is a tentative letter I came up
with:

Dear Ms. Steele,
It is with great concern that I have heard of your plan to eliminate
the composition program at Queensborough Community College, dismiss all
Queensborough English department adjuncts, and immediately cancel all
job searches in the department. Such measures will be extremely
detrimental not only to the QCC but to the image of CUNY in the academic
community. I sincerely hope that you will reconsider your decision to
punish the faculty members of the English department at Queensborough
Community College for exercising their academic freedom and professional
judgment. It is still not too late for you to stop the destruction of
the English program at QCC and avoid doing irreparable damage to CUNY’s
reputation.

It is admittedly not brilliant but I’m too angry to write anything
cogent, yet still at least marginally polite. If you can create a better
text, please do so. I will be very grateful for any help with this.
2. Let’s make this story as widely known as possible. If Karen
Steele’s superiors realize that she is causing great damage to QCC and
CUNY, they will have to do something. Please re-blog and re-post this
story on your own resources. The goal is to ensure that the story comes
up in search engines any time people search Karen Steele, QCC, and CUNY.
There is no blog or website that is too small to take part in this
effort. Just copy, paste, and press “Publish.”

If you do decide to re-post this story, please let me know. I want to
make a collection of links to all resources that choose to protect
academic freedom in this country by making this egregious situation
widely known. This is a strategy that worked before, and I’m confident that it will work now.
Thank you for standing in solidarity with educators!